6 ms·

Reading Arabic 'hard for brain'

15 points by k3dz 16y ago

pg 16y ago
I sensed this when learning classical Arabic in college. Even after a year of intensive (= every day) Arabic, I really had to think to read the letters. Back then there were already stories about studies showing the letters were hard for kids to learn, though IIRC they were just statistical studies.
- jbm 16y ago
  I studied classic Arabic when I was much younger for religious purposes. I never found it particularly difficult, but whenever I try to read normal Arabic it becomes an exercise in futility. I wonder if there is a real difference between reading the two or if it was just what I was used to.
  - kranner 16y ago
    Do you mean because normal Arabic lacks vowel markers? If so, I've got the same problem reading Urdu newspapers and fiction; one has to speak the word out loud and guess from the context what it 'completes' to.
- kranner 16y ago
  I've had a similar experience with learning the Perso-Arabic script recently, to be able to read Urdu. But this report does seem far-fetched. Trivia: lines from Urdu poetry are a normal class of conversational idiom here in North India, but after the partition of British India into modern India and Pakistan, the Urdu script isn't taught in school in most Indian states, and likewise for the Hindi script in Pakistan. Urdu and Hindi are practically the same language in informal use.
tokenadult 16y ago
Needs a lot more replication before I'll believe it. See Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Brain-Science-Evolution-Invention/dp/0670021105/ http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Brain-Science-Evolution-Invent... for a good recent, research-based account of how reading works.
hasenj 16y ago
> When someone learns to read Arabic they have to work out which letters are which, and which ones go with which sounds. How's this different from any other language? > telling the characters apart involves looking at very small details such as the placement of dots. Really? Try reading Chinese characters. The real challenge with learning Arabic is that no one speaks the classical/standard Arabic as a native tongue, each region has its own dialect, and so to be really effective at using Arabic to communicate with real life Arabs, you have to know a lot about 2 or 3 major dialects. Even in online writing, people mix standard Arabic with their own dialect or major dialects. If you understand Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, Egyptian, Syrian, and Iraqi dialects, then you can communicate effectively with 90% of Arabs. Basically you have to learn several (related) languages before you can communicate like a native Arab in the middle east. It's like learning Latin, Italian, Spanish and French at the same time. Reading is trivial in comparison.
- sliverstorm 16y ago
  > Really? Try reading Chinese characters. I studied Japanese, and I found that once you learn a Chinese character, you recognize it instantly like a picture. They have unique shapes, and not many are similar enough that you have to peer at it to discern the difference. Identifying Chinese characters, to me, is like distinguishing the letter "A" from "B" http://mural.uv.es/ciucama/kanji.gif http://mural.uv.es/ciucama/kanji.gif <= it may well look like gibberish to you, but I'm sure you can notice that they are largely unique, and even if you only look at the 'shape', you can tell the difference. From what I've seen of Arabic, identifying characters is often like distinguishing "0" from "O" and "l" from "1", or "W" from "VV" http://www.stanford.edu/dept/lc/arabic/alphabet/images/ArabicAlphabet.jpg http://www.stanford.edu/dept/lc/arabic/alphabet/images/Arabi... <= disclaimer: this IS gibberish to me, but even so I can notice than many many letters are very similar to others.
  - hasenj 16y ago
    o and 0? No, worst case it's like trying to tell appart l, i, j Anyway, being a native Arabic, I don't see any inherent difficulty in the writing system. I only encounter a problem if the font is bad or too small, or a combination of both. 10px in most standard Arabic fonts doesn't work very well. I don't know if Kanji is readable at 10px, but I personally can't read it at that size. Any native Japanese/Chinese to shed some light?
malkia 16y ago
"Israeli scientists believe they have identified why Arabic is particularly hard to learn to read." Nothing wrong with that, but someone would take it politically :)
- endtime 16y ago
  Israelis learn Arabic like Americans learn Spanish, so there's a good non-political explanation for it. :)
  - malkia 16y ago
    Ah, reminds me how we had to learn russian back in the commie days (I'm from Bulgaria). Nothing against russian, or it's people, but the regime required it.
  - hasenj 16y ago
    It's in their own interest to find better ways to teach/learn it. But it might also be in their interest to make it seem inferior ..
- mahmud 16y ago
  Or Economic. Israel is the greatest exporter of Arabic translation software to world governments.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
jurjenh 16y ago
I wonder what the implications of this are with respect to maths / logic. IIRC the left hemisphere of the brain does more of the logical thinking, with the right being more creative - does this mean that people who read / write a lot of Arabic tend to have more developed logical or analytical skills? Arabic numerals spring to mind, though they originated from India originally (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numerals http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numerals), and algebra and trigonometry have been developed a great deal by Arabic and Persian scholars - all these are fairly fundamental to mathematics. I wonder if there is any causation due to the written language, or would it merely be correlation?
- mahmud 16y ago
  The development of logic in the Islamic world has little to do with the Arabic language and everything to do with Islamic jurisprudence (Fiqh), and the conquest of settled, sedentary peoples in Persia, the Roman occupied Levant and Anatolia. Suddenly, Arabs found themselves heirs to great empires and custodians of far richer cultures than their own. The recent converts had to be immersed in the culture with something other than eloquent oration and rhetoric, as was the custom back in Arabia, since few of them spoke Arabic much less appreciated its word-craft. The converts themselves were running around interpreting Islam in their old, familiar ways; the Persians, subservient to their God-Kings would have idolized the new Arabs. Arab families from the inner-circle were vying for power, and old clan conflicts were beginning to threaten the new Caliphate. It was during this period of economic stability, but cultural chaos that Islamic scholars rediscovered* pockets of philosophical cults: Gnostics, Neoplatonists, Aristotelians, and various Christian offshoots, all off whom had highly developed systems of inquiry and exposition. These fringe groups were learned men who saw wisdom not only in Christian teachings, the state-sponsored religion, but also in the old teachings of sages and thinkers of antiquity. That's when Islam discovered Logic and fell in love. Unlike Rome, logic didn't threaten their religion because they believed their holly book was infallible; and the thought of man, once elevated, can only be in agreement with what God said, and if wrong, the error lay with man. The Caliphs threw scholarships at researchers and sent them digging in the books. First, it was a period of translation, followed by active search for lost Greek sources, and finally, once the attic dried, new research and development. Within 30 years of first contact, in Baghdad and Basra, Mecca and Madina; Logic, Rhetoric, Music, and Geometry were in school curricula, along with Quran. And the new students, learned in native Arabic and oblivious to translation, ran with the sciences and developed them, as any of their many indigenous crafts.
sunkencity 16y ago
it's not that easy to read apl either.
- silentbicycle 16y ago
  Really? It's like reading Chinese, but if it only had about fifty kanji and a perfectly regular grammar. I'll grant you that it's pretty intimidating when you start, though.
  - sunkencity 16y ago
    Apl looks pretty tough, though I would love to learn it. I know how to read persian/farsi, which I studied one course in at the university, I did not find it hard to learn to read that at all. Arabic is a little bit harder because there's more guesswork involved, but I don't know arabic. It's not the script, it's the way it's encoded imho, very few wovels are written down.
    - silentbicycle 16y ago
      If you're interested in APL, I'd suggest checking out J (http://jsoftware.com/ http://jsoftware.com/), a modern and free (though not open source) dialect, which only uses ascii. _J for C Programmers_ is pretty good. K, another APL dialect, is also quite amazing, but less free than J. (It's most recent version is called Q.) I don't know Farsi or Arabic, though. I studied Spanish and German in college, but majored in history rather than linguistics.
      - silentbicycle 16y ago
        (There's a conspiracy to make cool programming languages hard to google.)
touseefliaqat 16y ago
Sample size of only 40 students from 1.57 billion people who can read Arabic. Amazing...
andolanra 16y ago
The research this seems to be discussing is at least partly described in "Language status and hemispheric involvement in reading: Evidence from trilingual Arabic speakers tested in Arabic, Hebrew, and English" by Raphiq Ibrahim and Zohar Eviatar. So far, I haven't been able to turn up a copy, so I'll just list my non-neuroscientist questions and concerns. I don't mean that I don't believe it necessarily; just that I have trouble accepting a lot of these statements without further qualification and discussion. - Lateralization of brain function is a tricky business, because it's prone to exaggeration and urban legend. I'd like some clear citations for statements like, "When you are starting something new, there is a lot of [right hemisphere] involvement." - Given the preceding statement, I'd also like some clear citations for "When the eyes see something for just a short time, and it is at one side of a screen, only one brain hemisphere is quick enough to process the image." When I first read this sentence, it made sense to me, but things which appeal to common sense are not necessarily true. - What are the actual rates of recognition for the letters by the different speakers and for the different hemispheres? Was it really an all-or-nothing result, or was it a 49%-or-%51 result? - Because this experiment (apparently) only tested individual letters, how does one take into account the fact that Arabic letters change their form in various parts of a word? Perhaps Arabic words are easier to read than Hebrew words because the letters, when put together, have a more recognizable shape than Hebrew letters, which have a more uniform outline. Would right-brain recognition of Arabic words vs. Hebrew words yield different results than the individual letters? - Arabic is widely spoken in Israel, but what percentage of the Arabic speakers were native Arabic speakers who learned Hebrew later in life, and what percentage were native Hebrew speakers who learned Arabic later in life? How much later in life? - Arabic typeset on a computer can differ radically from calligraphic Arabic and handwritten Arabic. What variety was tested? Would handwritten Arabic (which generally uses lines instead of dots for diacritics) aid or hinder understanding? In general, science news prepared by non-scientific sources leaves out a lot of detail, but these are questions which I think could have a lot of bearing on the truth of this experiment.
spirulina 16y ago
Reading Arabic letters means paying attention to detail and where dots are located, especially when you first learn the language. Not an issue after that. I fail to see how that is "hard for the brain", when you know that the Arabic alphabet is limited to 28 letters. The OP should have looked at learning languages that have thousands of ideograms (Japanese Kanji, Chinese, etc...) Abstract of reference paper here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14744200 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14744200 It s a shame no full text of this research is freely available.
ithkuil 16y ago
"The researchers looked at 40 university students. Some of the students only spoke Hebrew, while some also spoke and read Arabic well." Does this mean that all the 40 students had prior knowledge in Hebrew? Does this mean that the ones which "only spoke Hebrew", only spoke it (but don't read and write it), or "spoke only Hebrew" (but don't speak Arabic). (perhaps I have the illusion that the sentence is ambiguous because I'm not a native English speaker, please correct me) Anyway, I fail to understand how this scientific experiment is being designed. I have the feeling that they are only testing the difficulty to learn Arabic glyphs with no scientifically measurable difficulty to learn Hebrew glyphs since the tested subjects already know them. But this cannot be true, I cannot believe that such a blatant experimental error is being performed and the results being published, so I have to be wrong. Can somebody shed more light on it?

15 points by k3dz 16y ago

pg 16y ago

I sensed this when learning classical Arabic in college. Even after a year of intensive (= every day) Arabic, I really had to think to read the letters. Back then there were already stories about studies showing the letters were hard for kids to learn, though IIRC they were just statistical studies.

jbm 16y ago
I studied classic Arabic when I was much younger for religious purposes. I never found it particularly difficult, but whenever I try to read normal Arabic it becomes an exercise in futility. I wonder if there is a real difference between reading the two or if it was just what I was used to.
- kranner 16y ago
  Do you mean because normal Arabic lacks vowel markers? If so, I've got the same problem reading Urdu newspapers and fiction; one has to speak the word out loud and guess from the context what it 'completes' to.
kranner 16y ago
I've had a similar experience with learning the Perso-Arabic script recently, to be able to read Urdu. But this report does seem far-fetched. Trivia: lines from Urdu poetry are a normal class of conversational idiom here in North India, but after the partition of British India into modern India and Pakistan, the Urdu script isn't taught in school in most Indian states, and likewise for the Hindi script in Pakistan. Urdu and Hindi are practically the same language in informal use.

tokenadult 16y ago

Needs a lot more replication before I'll believe it. See Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Brain-Science-Evolution-Invention/dp/0670021105/ http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Brain-Science-Evolution-Invent... for a good recent, research-based account of how reading works.

hasenj 16y ago

> When someone learns to read Arabic they have to work out which letters are which, and which ones go with which sounds. How's this different from any other language? > telling the characters apart involves looking at very small details such as the placement of dots. Really? Try reading Chinese characters. The real challenge with learning Arabic is that no one speaks the classical/standard Arabic as a native tongue, each region has its own dialect, and so to be really effective at using Arabic to communicate with real life Arabs, you have to know a lot about 2 or 3 major dialects. Even in online writing, people mix standard Arabic with their own dialect or major dialects. If you understand Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, Egyptian, Syrian, and Iraqi dialects, then you can communicate effectively with 90% of Arabs. Basically you have to learn several (related) languages before you can communicate like a native Arab in the middle east. It's like learning Latin, Italian, Spanish and French at the same time. Reading is trivial in comparison.

sliverstorm 16y ago
> Really? Try reading Chinese characters. I studied Japanese, and I found that once you learn a Chinese character, you recognize it instantly like a picture. They have unique shapes, and not many are similar enough that you have to peer at it to discern the difference. Identifying Chinese characters, to me, is like distinguishing the letter "A" from "B" http://mural.uv.es/ciucama/kanji.gif http://mural.uv.es/ciucama/kanji.gif <= it may well look like gibberish to you, but I'm sure you can notice that they are largely unique, and even if you only look at the 'shape', you can tell the difference. From what I've seen of Arabic, identifying characters is often like distinguishing "0" from "O" and "l" from "1", or "W" from "VV" http://www.stanford.edu/dept/lc/arabic/alphabet/images/ArabicAlphabet.jpg http://www.stanford.edu/dept/lc/arabic/alphabet/images/Arabi... <= disclaimer: this IS gibberish to me, but even so I can notice than many many letters are very similar to others.
- hasenj 16y ago
  o and 0? No, worst case it's like trying to tell appart l, i, j Anyway, being a native Arabic, I don't see any inherent difficulty in the writing system. I only encounter a problem if the font is bad or too small, or a combination of both. 10px in most standard Arabic fonts doesn't work very well. I don't know if Kanji is readable at 10px, but I personally can't read it at that size. Any native Japanese/Chinese to shed some light?

malkia 16y ago

"Israeli scientists believe they have identified why Arabic is particularly hard to learn to read." Nothing wrong with that, but someone would take it politically :)

endtime 16y ago
Israelis learn Arabic like Americans learn Spanish, so there's a good non-political explanation for it. :)
- malkia 16y ago
  Ah, reminds me how we had to learn russian back in the commie days (I'm from Bulgaria). Nothing against russian, or it's people, but the regime required it.
- hasenj 16y ago
  It's in their own interest to find better ways to teach/learn it. But it might also be in their interest to make it seem inferior ..
mahmud 16y ago
Or Economic. Israel is the greatest exporter of Arabic translation software to world governments.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

jurjenh 16y ago

I wonder what the implications of this are with respect to maths / logic. IIRC the left hemisphere of the brain does more of the logical thinking, with the right being more creative - does this mean that people who read / write a lot of Arabic tend to have more developed logical or analytical skills? Arabic numerals spring to mind, though they originated from India originally (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numerals http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numerals), and algebra and trigonometry have been developed a great deal by Arabic and Persian scholars - all these are fairly fundamental to mathematics. I wonder if there is any causation due to the written language, or would it merely be correlation?

mahmud 16y ago
The development of logic in the Islamic world has little to do with the Arabic language and everything to do with Islamic jurisprudence (Fiqh), and the conquest of settled, sedentary peoples in Persia, the Roman occupied Levant and Anatolia. Suddenly, Arabs found themselves heirs to great empires and custodians of far richer cultures than their own. The recent converts had to be immersed in the culture with something other than eloquent oration and rhetoric, as was the custom back in Arabia, since few of them spoke Arabic much less appreciated its word-craft. The converts themselves were running around interpreting Islam in their old, familiar ways; the Persians, subservient to their God-Kings would have idolized the new Arabs. Arab families from the inner-circle were vying for power, and old clan conflicts were beginning to threaten the new Caliphate. It was during this period of economic stability, but cultural chaos that Islamic scholars rediscovered* pockets of philosophical cults: Gnostics, Neoplatonists, Aristotelians, and various Christian offshoots, all off whom had highly developed systems of inquiry and exposition. These fringe groups were learned men who saw wisdom not only in Christian teachings, the state-sponsored religion, but also in the old teachings of sages and thinkers of antiquity. That's when Islam discovered Logic and fell in love. Unlike Rome, logic didn't threaten their religion because they believed their holly book was infallible; and the thought of man, once elevated, can only be in agreement with what God said, and if wrong, the error lay with man. The Caliphs threw scholarships at researchers and sent them digging in the books. First, it was a period of translation, followed by active search for lost Greek sources, and finally, once the attic dried, new research and development. Within 30 years of first contact, in Baghdad and Basra, Mecca and Madina; Logic, Rhetoric, Music, and Geometry were in school curricula, along with Quran. And the new students, learned in native Arabic and oblivious to translation, ran with the sciences and developed them, as any of their many indigenous crafts.

sunkencity 16y ago

it's not that easy to read apl either.

silentbicycle 16y ago
Really? It's like reading Chinese, but if it only had about fifty kanji and a perfectly regular grammar. I'll grant you that it's pretty intimidating when you start, though.
- sunkencity 16y ago
  Apl looks pretty tough, though I would love to learn it. I know how to read persian/farsi, which I studied one course in at the university, I did not find it hard to learn to read that at all. Arabic is a little bit harder because there's more guesswork involved, but I don't know arabic. It's not the script, it's the way it's encoded imho, very few wovels are written down.
  - silentbicycle 16y ago
    If you're interested in APL, I'd suggest checking out J (http://jsoftware.com/ http://jsoftware.com/), a modern and free (though not open source) dialect, which only uses ascii. _J for C Programmers_ is pretty good. K, another APL dialect, is also quite amazing, but less free than J. (It's most recent version is called Q.) I don't know Farsi or Arabic, though. I studied Spanish and German in college, but majored in history rather than linguistics.
    - silentbicycle 16y ago
      (There's a conspiracy to make cool programming languages hard to google.)

touseefliaqat 16y ago

Sample size of only 40 students from 1.57 billion people who can read Arabic. Amazing...

andolanra 16y ago

The research this seems to be discussing is at least partly described in "Language status and hemispheric involvement in reading: Evidence from trilingual Arabic speakers tested in Arabic, Hebrew, and English" by Raphiq Ibrahim and Zohar Eviatar. So far, I haven't been able to turn up a copy, so I'll just list my non-neuroscientist questions and concerns. I don't mean that I don't believe it necessarily; just that I have trouble accepting a lot of these statements without further qualification and discussion. - Lateralization of brain function is a tricky business, because it's prone to exaggeration and urban legend. I'd like some clear citations for statements like, "When you are starting something new, there is a lot of [right hemisphere] involvement." - Given the preceding statement, I'd also like some clear citations for "When the eyes see something for just a short time, and it is at one side of a screen, only one brain hemisphere is quick enough to process the image." When I first read this sentence, it made sense to me, but things which appeal to common sense are not necessarily true. - What are the actual rates of recognition for the letters by the different speakers and for the different hemispheres? Was it really an all-or-nothing result, or was it a 49%-or-%51 result? - Because this experiment (apparently) only tested individual letters, how does one take into account the fact that Arabic letters change their form in various parts of a word? Perhaps Arabic words are easier to read than Hebrew words because the letters, when put together, have a more recognizable shape than Hebrew letters, which have a more uniform outline. Would right-brain recognition of Arabic words vs. Hebrew words yield different results than the individual letters? - Arabic is widely spoken in Israel, but what percentage of the Arabic speakers were native Arabic speakers who learned Hebrew later in life, and what percentage were native Hebrew speakers who learned Arabic later in life? How much later in life? - Arabic typeset on a computer can differ radically from calligraphic Arabic and handwritten Arabic. What variety was tested? Would handwritten Arabic (which generally uses lines instead of dots for diacritics) aid or hinder understanding? In general, science news prepared by non-scientific sources leaves out a lot of detail, but these are questions which I think could have a lot of bearing on the truth of this experiment.

spirulina 16y ago

Reading Arabic letters means paying attention to detail and where dots are located, especially when you first learn the language. Not an issue after that. I fail to see how that is "hard for the brain", when you know that the Arabic alphabet is limited to 28 letters. The OP should have looked at learning languages that have thousands of ideograms (Japanese Kanji, Chinese, etc...) Abstract of reference paper here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14744200 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14744200 It s a shame no full text of this research is freely available.

ithkuil 16y ago

"The researchers looked at 40 university students. Some of the students only spoke Hebrew, while some also spoke and read Arabic well." Does this mean that all the 40 students had prior knowledge in Hebrew? Does this mean that the ones which "only spoke Hebrew", only spoke it (but don't read and write it), or "spoke only Hebrew" (but don't speak Arabic). (perhaps I have the illusion that the sentence is ambiguous because I'm not a native English speaker, please correct me) Anyway, I fail to understand how this scientific experiment is being designed. I have the feeling that they are only testing the difficulty to learn Arabic glyphs with no scientifically measurable difficulty to learn Hebrew glyphs since the tested subjects already know them. But this cannot be true, I cannot believe that such a blatant experimental error is being performed and the results being published, so I have to be wrong. Can somebody shed more light on it?